JULY 18, 2011 Washington, Wall Street, and the business world were astounded and dismayed by the dismal employment statistics put forth by the government. We need 125,000 jobs every month just to account for people entering the work force, but numbers show only 18,000 more jobs in June and 25,000 in May. And the June numbers included the assumption that 131,000 net jobs were created by newly formed companies, a generous assumption that has proven to be consistently overstated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the past three years. Equally concerning is that the underlying employment numbers are even worse than Washington's gloss. Almost ignored by the press is the fact that full-time employment cratered by 435,000 in the last month and over the past three months it is down by a combined total of 868,000 jobs. There has been a three percent increase in the number of people on part-time work, but full-time employment has been down 0.5 percent for the full year. In fact, all of the net job increases since President Obama came into office were part-time employees and not full-time employees, a critical distinction. All of this is in the context of the most stimulative fiscal and monetary policy in the history of this country. This is scarily abnormal. We are 24 months into a recovery. Normally we'd be enjoying 180,000 more jobs a month. We have only a tenth of that. We have lost over 8.5 million jobs in the Great Recession and only 1.5 million have returned in contrast to a normal recovery where all job losses have been recovered two years into a recovery phase. In fact the total ranks of the unemployed jumped 173,000 and crossed over the 14 million mark for the first time this year. The scale of the great job famine is exemplified by the number of people 16 years and over who are at work or actively seeking it, the so-called labor participation rate. In 2008, when Obama promised that his stimulus program would prevent unemployment from exce